“He’d finished his sentence,” Alaric said bluntly.
Lionel looked at me. He wanted counsel. He always did. My first gut answer was simple and honest. Let them come. Let his militias march the castle steps so I could unmake them all in one crack of lightning. It would be mercy to end the rot quickly. It was the release I craved since the plague.
My power was not a show. It was cleansing. A last resort. When the kingdom had drowned in despair, I did not drown with it. I unleashed the storm and did what had to be done.
You ask for proof? My memory kept it like a tally. Every soul who’d coughed blood, contagion hitch inside them like a parasite. I’d focused the storm until sound became white and thin as bone. Lightning had answered my thought, and where it’d struck, there’d been no slow decay, only ash. I couldn’t pretend that I had been gentle. It had stopped the spread everywhere the thunder had rolled.
When rioters had surged with swords and torches, I had stood on the castle steps and painted the night with light. Do not ask me about color or beauty. Ask whether the city had lived the next morning. It had.
Inside me was an inexplicable storm starved for death. I could call a current that tore through armor, cities, and mountains. I did not cast pretty spells. I shaped weather into judgement. The king needed someone who would, without trembling, pull the cruel lever when his kingdom’s survival depended on it.
But there was a cost. The storm scratched at my insides like a caged wolf. It asked for release and remembered every time I held it in. So I used every face I ever made into silence, remembered every single one of them and used their pain to keep the storm at bay.
And since the plague, the kingdom felt peace, but I didn’t. Now, the storm ached for release like never before.
But that was not Lionel’s way. He was a peacemaker. He counted lives like a caring shepherd; he would not throw the scales into a fire to sate a whim. I swallowed the words that would please me and offered what the kingdom needed.
“What’s your recommendation, Alaric?” I asked. He looked at me as if I would hedge.
Alaric braced himself. “Increase patrols around the castle. Lift the watch over the gutters. And have our agents report anything unusual immediately.”
Those measures would put our spies in danger. They were necessary anyway. “Stock the armory with arrows,” I said. “Prepare for siege.”
Alaric’s nod was short, businesslike. Agreement between us was rare, but it was there. Men like him preferred a plan they understood.
“Have battlemages at the towers,” Lionel added. “See the queen and my daughter safely escorted to the manor in Shelb. Let no delay hinder them.” Then he paused. A man who always kept his voice even, he said the next words in a tone too dark for him. “And Kael…” The hesitation refracted something harder than doubt.
When a king hesitated, the pause contained a verdict of its own. “I never imagined I would need to ask this,” Lionel said finally. “I chose you… for wisdom and discipline, not for the power you wield. Not… this.”
The implication hung in the air. He did not say the words, but he meant them. My power was the last resort. As much was acknowledged.
“If you must,” Lionel finished, and the phrase came out like a prayer and a plea both, “I want you at the forefront of the battlefield.”
There were polite orders and there were absolutes. This was the latter. I tasted the permission like iron. My fingers grew restless. The storm that lived beneath my skin flared with the thought of release.
Alaric’s jaw tightened. He was a soldier. He read the sentence plainly. Lionel’s eyes narrowed in grief I could not fix for him. A peacemaker, yes, but he, too, had his limits. Dereck Thorne was on the verge of crossing them.
“I will do as you command,” I said, and the words were steady. Inside, something like hunger unfurled. I swore on the Crown Iwould strike clean and quick. If the gutters rose, I would turn them to ash.
When I left the chamber, the static still hummed beneath my skin. A smile eased across my face, dark and inevitable.
I was on my way to my chambers when I saw her. She looked broken, as if someone had hollowed her out and left the shell behind. The sight did nothing to steady my control.
At first, I kept my distance and spoke of Selena to distract myself. Selena was simply Selena, and Evie had been unsettled by her coldness, by the cracked mask the woman wore since the plague. I had seen how deeply it had struck her.
So I reassured her, saying Selena posed no danger. After all, she was not me.
Then the storm within me drove me to the unthinkable. I caught her pretty face, seized her by her bound hair and forced her to meet my gaze.
The way her eyes went wide and brimmed with tears as my fingers clutched her sent vertigo through me and unfurled dark images in my mind.
In that instant, I saw everything I wanted to do to her.
I imagined shredding her black robe, lifting her on top of the railing and taking her while my hand squeezed her throat so hard she couldn’t scream.
Actually, I wanted her to scream. I would flip her toward the railing and take her there, rough and raw, while she answered me with no resistance, only the tremor of want. And her sweet, breaking voice would fill the castle walls with eternal echoes.
I would hold her tight while lightning danced across her skin and my tongue traced each secret place, every slit, and whether she’d beg for mercy or for continuance didn't matter. I just wanted to see what she’d look like, begging.
